Remaking Spaces for Public Use

MEASURED in square footage alone, the public will lose some room when Sony USA reshapes the base of the former A.T. & T. headquarters on Madison Avenue, into which it is moving this year. But the New York City Planning Commission has approved the transformation, in the belief that the result will be an amenity that is far more engaging and welcoming than the existing arcade and covered pedestrian space.

The case illustrates the broader problem faced by owners, planners and the public when privately built amenities -- no matter how well intended -- do not function as planned or do not materialize at all. There is the dance rehearsal studio next to the City Center of Music and Drama that never got built. There is the isolated little East River esplanade to which some neighbors feel uncomfortable going. There is the mid-Manhattan hotel that has taken away the chairs and tables in its atrium.

"New York is unforgiving, both in terms of its climate and its holistic environmental state," said Charles Gwathmey, a partner in Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects of Manhattan. "One can recreate a 'public' space and make it more usable and accessible, sometimes by enclosing it, sometimes by changing its nature."

Mr. Gwathmey and his colleagues are doing that, working for Sony to reconfigure the base of the A.T. & T. Building, which was designed 14 years ago by Philip Johnson and John Burgee.

"The present layout was done for a different client who wanted monumentality," Mr. Johnson recalled. "They didn't want the entrance to the august A.T. & T. Building to be between two shops. Although we knew the city always wanted the retail to be continuous on Madison Avenue, we fought and won to have it in the back alley.

"It turned out, in the event, that it was kind of cold and dark in there, which the City Planning Commission had warned us. They warned us, but A.T. & T. was adamant -- they wanted a Bernini kind of monumentality."

The 60-foot-high, open-air arcade along Madison Avenue provides cool, shady haven on the hottest summer days. Most other times, however, it feels bleak, dank, noisy and windblown. Between the 36-story tower and a 4-story annex is a covered pedestrian space running from 55th to 56th Street. This is brighter than the arcade, thanks to a vaulted skylight. But it, too, is exposed to the weather and has few features to attract pedestrians, except for a cluster of stores that make the passageway feel cramped.

"It was a bonusable amenity that became nonusable," said Brenda Levin, a member of the planning commission. Usable or not, however, these spaces earned a development bonus for A.T. & T. of an extra 104,181 square feet of office space in the 685,000-square-foot tower above, which was finished in 1983.

There is no telling how long the public areas would have remained in their current state had A.T. & T. not decided in 1990 to move out and lease the tower. Sony signed as the tenant last year. Four months ago, it announced its intention to replace some of the public areas with shops and to redesign the rest of the space to make it "more lively, exciting and comfortable."

"Sony is about communication, dealing with people -- music, movies, video," Mr. Gwathmey said. "They wanted to dispel the elitist image and engage the building with the ground and make it participatory."

On Aug. 24, after several revisions had been made, the planning commission approved the project by a substantial majority, although no formal vote had to be taken since the matter was technically considered a minor modification. Mr. Gwathmey said work could begin early next year and be completed by January 1994.

The Sony plan may solve one problem, but many others remain.

FOR example, the City Planning Department is hearing more complaints from residents of apartment towers where developers provided plazas to get a floor-area bonus, said Robert Flahive, director of the agency's Manhattan office. As an example, he cited a building at First Avenue and 80th Street developed by Jack Resnick & Sons.

"The people living over the plazas don't have a lot of sympathy for people who are hanging out there," Mr. Flahive said, "whether it's homeless people at night or kids throwing a ball against the wall while waiting for the school bus in the morning.

"The developer is very happy to provide the plaza because it gives him a 20 percent bonus," he said. "But the people who live there don't get a 20 percent bonus. Not surprisingly, they're quite adamant in saying, 'What do you mean people have a right to be in my plaza?' "

To address the issue of access, the planning commission is now considering allowing owners of some plazas in mid-Manhattan to apply for permission to close them at night, in the interest of security and public safety.

Access is a critical consideration in other areas. Even before the official opening last Wednesday of a two-block esplanade from 36th to 38th Streets on the East River, Community Board 6 had urged that a permanent fence be constructed around the little riverside park as a security measure. The esplanade was built by the Glick Organization in exchange for a 20 percent floor-area bonus at the nearby Horizon apartment tower, 415 East 37th Street.

Another key issue is how an amenity is furnished. At the Hotel Parker Meridien, 119 West 56th Street, the management has removed the chairs and tables that were supposed to be in the public atrium, under a special permit by which certain zoning rules were waived for the developer, the Jack Parker Corporation.

In applying to modify the special permit, the hotel said the chairs and tables posed "security problems," Mr. Flahive said. That may translate as attracting homeless people or street people who menace or discomfit guests. But the hotel's spokeswoman said that because the matter was in litigation, the management would have nothing to say about the situation. "They won't admit there's a problem," said Michael Presser, chairman of Community Board 5. "They just won't communicate with us."

In January, the Buildings Department issued a violation, stating: "Movable chairs and tables not found."

After four adjournments before an administrative law judge at the city's Environmental Control Board, the case was heard in August and dismissed two weeks ago, on the ground that the buildings agency had incorrectly cited the applicable law, said Vahe Tiryakian, a spokesman for the department.

"We're going to keep on this one," Mr. Tiryakian said, "because it seems to us a clear-cut case where the special permit states that they must provide these amenities. Unless they do, we're going to keep issuing violations or whatever else needs to be done to get them to comply."

More extreme is the case of Cityspire, a residential and office tower at 150 West 56th Street that was built 11 feet taller than permitted. To settle the case without having to dismantle the top of the skyscraper, Eichner Properties agreed four years ago to build a 7,200-square-foot rehearsal studio over a mid-block arcade. Today, there is neither arcade nor studio; only a raw, unfinished shell behind a chain-link fence.

Mr. Presser said any efforts to extract the amenity had been frustrated because Cityspire is bankrupt. A caller to the office of the developer, Ian Bruce Eichner, was told that he no longer owned the building. Fred C. Trump 3d of Shorenstein Company East, managing agents of Cityspire's commercial space, confirmed that the building was in bankruptcy and that a work-out was in progress. However, he would not identify the prospective new owners and said they had no comment on the studio and arcade.

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Against this backdrop, it is clear that the public areas at the A.T. & T. Building were scarcely the most troublesome in the city. However, even Mr. Johnson acknowledged that the I.B.M. plaza, on the other side of 56th Street, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, was a "very much better people place that's air-conditioned, open to the public and very welcoming."

About his own creation, Mr. Johnson said: "The arcade is marvelous and I'm sorry to lose it. But Sony wanted to use it much more as a people place. It isn't that my ideas have changed. The period has changed."

Under Sony's plan, new stores will be built into six bays of the arcade that flank the main entrance on Madison Avenue, taking up 6,380 square feet. The storefronts will only be 16 feet high. Above that, the arches will remain empty, behind a glass wall. The inner columns will be illuminated at night.

As a result of discussions with city planners and Community Board 5, one bay of the arcade will remain open along each of the side streets, so there is a clear route from Madison Avenue to the mid-block pedestrian space. Originally, Sony planned to install stores along the entire arcade frontage.

The mid-block pedestrian space will be enclosed at both ends, by a glass wall and a "curtain" of forced air, so that the climate can be controlled. It will get 30-foot olive trees, new food kiosks, and 230 seats. Enormous, cage-like, tubular lighting fixtures, added in recent years by A.T. & T., are to be replaced by something more subtle.

Two existing kiosks and the retail cluster at the center of the space will be removed. Adjacent portions of the arcade will be turned into great public "lounges," as Mr. Gwathmey calls them. "They are acoustically much more private spaces where you can sit, have a cup of coffee and watch activity," he said. "They are places of repose."

In the annex, the A.T. & T. Infoquest Center, a telecommunications exhibition, will be replaced by Sony Media World. This would be a "hands-on, participatory, high-tech, museum-type space," Mr. Gwathmey said.

In addition, the tower lobby, which once felt like a private sanctum to which the public was not particularly welcome, is to be made more inviting, through explicit signage and a new centerpiece, which Mr. Gwathmey described only as a "very animated object."

("The Spirit of Communications," a gilded allegorical statue better known as "Golden Boy," used to stand in the lobby, having been moved from A.T. & T.'s earlier headquarters at 195 Broadway. It was taken away in April and is to be installed later this year at the vistors' entrance to the A.T. & T. operations center in Basking Ridge, N.J.)

After revisions were made, Community Board 5 supported the Sony plan. "It's sort of exciting to be able to come around again on something and have the opportunity to make it work better," Mr. Presser said. "If the parties involved want to work at these things, as we've seen with A.T. & T., it's still possible to turn them around."

Not everyone was so enthusiastic. "To bring back the commercial to the street edge destroys what is a valued and useful space," said Harry Simmons Jr., a Brooklyn-based architect who was an associate on the original A.T. & T. project.

AMANDA BURDEN, a planning commission member, said that at first she was "rather strongly against the proposal because I felt that the public enjoyed the space."

"I went and sat in the space on a sunny day and all the seats were taken," she recalled. "Then I went back a few nights later. It was raining and no one was in the A.T. & T. space. Everyone was in the I.B.M. space."

Ms. Burden said she was won over by the provision of ample movable seating, two food kiosks and arcades leading to the passageway from Madison Avenue. "I think this can work as well or better than I.B.M.," she said.

Her colleague, Ms. Levin, said she was aware of "the obligation we have to the public not to give something that's theirs away." However, she added, "I came to the conclusion that the space had never worked, never was going to work and that substantial change was appropriate." She also said it was "totally appropriate" to return retail to Madison Avenue, south of 57th Street.

But the chairman of the community board's land-use committee, Joseph B. Rose, warned that "there is a dangerous precedent being set there in trying to improve public space by converting much of it into retail."

Mr. Gwathmey insisted that the Sony proposal would not be a precedent. Among the qualities that made it unique, he said, was that it actually created more of a development bonus than had previously existed.

For every square foot of arcade, A.T. & T. received an extra three square feet of office space. Since the arcade is shrinking by 10,560, that means a loss of 31,680 square feet of bonus. However, the mid-block pedestrian space carries a much higher bonus ratio -- 11 to 1 -- as it is considered a more desirable amenity. And this space is growing by 4,106 square feet, thereby generating an additional 45,166 square feet of bonus, more than offsetting the loss from the arcade.

As a technical matter, the Sony plan was considered a minor modification. Had it been a major modification, it would have had to go through a more complete and complex review, something that Mr. Rose urged.

"It looked, quacked and floated like a major modification," Mr. Rose said. "This was a particularly significant action that, from a procedural perspective, went through a minimal amount of review."

But Mr. Flahive said it was subjected to ample scrutiny because Richard L. Schaffer, the chairman of the planning commission, deemed it important enough to undergo a public hearing, which was not required.

As a result of the give and take, Mr. Flahive said he thought the proposal was substantially improved. "It's certainly been refined," he said, "which probably bodes well for the next group. There are a lot of spaces that just aren't working out as they should. Having this level of public discussion on reconstituting the space is important."

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A version of this article appears in print on September 27, 1992, on Page 10010001 of the National edition with the headline: Remaking Spaces for Public Use. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe